Moon is wetter than previously thought, new study suggests

A new study from scientists at Brown University finds surprisingly large amounts of water trapped inside volcanic deposits on the moon. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A new study from scientists at Brown University finds surprisingly large amounts of water trapped inside volcanic deposits on the moon. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Scientists long believed that the moon had been almost completely depleted of water and other unstable compounds. Then, in 2008, researchers from Brown found trace amounts of water in some volcanic glass beads returned to Earth from the Apollo 15 and 17 lunar missions, according to a university statement appearing in Phys.org. Further study in 2011 showed that the volcanic beads contain similar amounts of water as some basalts on Earth.

The main question for the new researchers was whether the Apollo samples represented unusually water-rich lunar regions or a more widespread phenomenon.

"By looking at the orbital data, we can examine the large pyroclastic deposits on the Moon that were never sampled by the Apollo or Luna missions," said lead author Ralph Milliken, an associate professor at Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, in the statement. "The fact that nearly all of them exhibit signatures of water suggests that the Apollo samples are not anomalous, so it may be that the bulk interior of the Moon is wet."

Evidence is growing that water in the moon's interior may have been transported there by comets or asteroids before the moon had completely solidified, said co-author Shuai Li, a recent Brown Ph.D. graduate. "The exact origin of water in the lunar interior is still a big question," Li added, however